Andrew Wilkinson's $20,000 to $260,000,000 story (#521)

All right.

What's going on? This is Sam. We've got an awesome episode today. We have Andrew Wilkinson on the pod. Andrew's one of our good buddies. Andrew owns this company called Tiny. Tiny basically started as like this agency that made a bunch of profit and he took those profit and he's bought like 18 or 20 different companies and he took Tiny public. I think today it's trading in the $600 million market cap. So he's got like a really good perspective on what's going on in life. Um, during this episode, I think it's the, the like With 20 minutes left in the episode, he's actually said something that I'm, I'm sitting here taking notes. It's gonna change my business. It's about the, this thing he called the profit-first, uh, mentality. And he goes in, in depth on how much money he leaves in each business and how the CEOs are able to operate 'em. And it's really insightful stuff that I haven't really heard him talk about before. And then also Andrew is interesting to me because Andrew's my close friend, but he's very wealthy and I get to ask him all types of questions, uh, kind of like behind the scenes stuff on how he spends his money. He talks about how he is now a patient of Peter Attia. Who's this famous doctor and how much he's spending on that and the outcome of that. I find it very interesting. He talks about shooting his shot with his hero. So he's done business with guys like Bill Ackman, who's a, you know, worth $10 or $20 billion as a hedge fund guy. And he talks about how he met Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's partner. And so there's really interesting insights on how he lives his life, but how he got in the doors that he did when he was still up and coming. Really fascinating. So this is the episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Let me know what you guys think. You can hit me up on Twitter @TheSamParr and let me know if you enjoyed it.

All right, what's up? We got the man here, Andrew Wilkinson, fan favorite guest of the pod. Um, welcome, Andrew. How's it, how's it going?

Hey guys, I'm good.

So you gave us like a list of like ideas and things that you're kind of messing with, but you have this thing on here about sexy versus non-sexy things. And you're like, the things that everyone loves on the outside, they're the hardest ways to make a living. And so you said here that I didn't know this. I, or maybe I did. I knew you owned a bakery. Is, you said you own a deli and a bakery. Is that two separate things or is it one thing?

No, that's combined. That's one.

And it's a pain in the butt.

Total pain in the ass. So yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I think when you talk to young entrepreneurs, they always want to do something sexy. And I was like that too. Like I was a product CEO, right? You think every CEO kind of has their thing. And for me, it was making great products. So when I was running software companies and stuff, I'd always be thinking, oh, when we release this new feature, that's when everything will take off. Or, uh, you know, when we get this partnership or, you know, whatever big announcements, I think flashy. But one of the things I've realized after running a company for like 20 years is it's really not the sexy stuff that pays off. Um, you know, for example, like we have a bunch of companies, um, and, you know, one increased prices 30% after not increasing prices for 5 years. They massively grew profits, right? That took 10 minutes, a little bit of planning. Um, and that paid off big. Um, you know, one significantly reduced shipping costs by sizing down packaging. Um, you know, another realized, hey, we've got insane SEO on certain keywords and now we can drive affiliate revenue. One had a bunch of customer gift card deposits and they were like, oh shit, we can invest these in T-bills and make 5%, makes $500 grand a year of just pure profit. I just love these boring things like that. And I've realized that it's kind of sad. Like, you know, I grew up being like, oh yeah, I want to be the next Steve Jobs or James Dyson or something. But the things I'm actually good at are these really, really boring— I call them like lever pulls. You get in, you pull a lever, and revenue or earnings just grows, you know, by X percent. This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed. HubSpot. Grow better.

You know, the good thing about that is that the older you get, the more like appealing those get. And so for example, like, and this also is just in life, like, you know, I've never seen a couch I don't like. You know, the older I get, I'm just like, yeah, it'd be nice to sit right now. And I feel like the same thing happens in business where I used to think I wanted to pull off some like awesome feat of like creativity and hard work. And I actually very rarely want to do that. There's times, but most of the time I'm like, oh, what's the simplest thing I could do that will just make this work better.

And you were the king of that. You were, you were the king of that. You, you owned a video streaming startup that were, or you were like to the moon or nowhere. Uh, and you spent like 5 years or 4 years doing it.

I mean, you were all in building crazy computer vision features and all this stuff, even before AI became like, you know, really big. And, and the reality was like, we had this other business called Birthday Alarm. Birthday Alarm was like a reminder of It's your friend's birthday today. And they would send them a cheesy e-card, you know, if you paid $9 a year. And that business had been printing cash, millions of dollars every year for like 15+ years. I think it started in 2001. And I'm, this was like, I was working on it like in 2016, 2018. So like, you know, 18 years later. And, um, we, we were like, you know, at one point we finally got our senses and we were like, why don't we make Birthday Alarm like a little bit better. Like, uh, it pays all the bills. We could just improve it. Right. And even then the team was like, list of ideas, rewrite the whole thing in the new, like, you know, make it rewrite it in JavaScript. Oh, it's written in this old like language. Cause that's what was hot in 2001. We got to rewrite the whole thing. And then when we do that, we'll be able to make it so much cooler. We'll add these new features. We'll redesign this. We redesigned it. Our designer spent mockup after mockup on like making it cleaner and more minimalist and more cool or whatever. And I tell you what, after a year of doing all that shit, there was really only two things that made a difference. Number one, we raised prices. So, you know, raise prices by 30%. Exactly what you said, Andrew, because prices hadn't gone up in 15 years.

You just delete the zero in the $20 a month and change that to a 5. So it's $25 a month.

Exactly. And then the second thing was, um, we implemented Stripe instead of the old payments platform because Stripe had a feature where if somebody's credit card expires and they get a new one, like an auto, they, you know, their credit card company gives them a new one, it would mess up your subscription. And they were, Stripe has a feature for, for 25 cents, they would just update it with the new card automatically without the user having to go type anything in. And that one, like one feature. Is like a, you know, 7-figure feature that took honestly no work on. We just check a box on, on Stripe to be like, yeah, we want that. We'll pay the quarter for every time you do that. And, um, you know, we made like an extra million dollars a year of profit just off of that one thing basically. And, uh, it was a big lesson learned of like, you know, the, the link between effort and result is, uh, so much more disconnected than you think. And, uh, the more mature you get, the more you realize like you should just work backwards from what's actually going to work, not like what's the cool or difficult thing to do.

These, these things too, they're so often they're one day of work, right? Like we had a similar thing. We had this invoicing software about 10 years ago called Ballpark. And it was the first SaaS product that we built. And we realized we were doing like, I think, $100 million of payment volume through the credit card processing. So You know, I send Sam an invoice for $10 grand and he has the option to pay on credit card and we just marked it up too. And I think that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to us. And I remember it was like 10 minutes for me. I was like going through Stripe and realized there's this setting and I checked a box and suddenly we make way more money. So I think, um, this stuff is super powerful. And I mean, like, just to tell, to like give an example. So, um, you know, Sam mentioned, so I own like a deli and a bakery. And when I was a kid, there was this bakery down at the end of my street that I would always go to on the weekends. I'd go and get a croissant and have a coffee and sit and listen to a podcast or something. And I knew the owner. My brother worked there. The owner would pay me like $10 an hour to fix his computer. And about 8 years ago, he comes to me and he's like, hey, I'm going to sell the business. I want to make sure it goes into good hands. Will you buy it? And I don't know anything about the bakery or anything, but I kind of want to protect this like cool neighborhood institution.

And so you want to be like a big shot. You want to be like, oh, I got it. Come hang out at my place.

You know, like, would you like some of my bread?

Yeah, totally.

There's like, there's always like a pride of ownership, right? Like if I tell someone, let's say like locally, I'm like, hey, I own this huge social network for graphic designers, Dribbble. They're like, you know, eyes glaze over. They don't care. But if I say, oh, I own Ottavio, like the local bakery that everybody goes to with their kids. They're like, whoa, that's so cool. So there's a lot of pride of ownership, but there's like 30 or 40 employees. You know, we have to make sure like a baker wakes up at 2 in the morning to bake the croissants. A million different things have to go right to serve a customer and have them have a good experience. Right. And this business is like, you know, it goes from making money one month to losing money for 6 months. You know, huge swings. If like one person quits, it messes up everything. Super complicated to operate. And if we're lucky, at the end of all of that, we'll maybe make $150,000 a year. Now, on the flip side, we bought a business about almost 10 years ago called weworkremotely.com, and it's very simple. It's a job board. People pay money to post like a blue link, kind of like Craigslist. So you're hiring remote, you post on WeWork Remotely. It would be like, you know, I'm hiring a developer for, you know, Automattic or whatever. So we were— when we bought that business, they were charging $199 and it was run by the guys from Basecamp and they just didn't do any marketing or promotion, didn't do any SEO. So we buy the business, we pay 3 or 4 times earnings or something, which was, you know, a fair price given what it was doing. We immediately take the price from $199 to $299 because that's what all the other job boards were charging. And we hire an SEO consultant. We start doing SEO, we start doing email marketing. That business went from doing about $400K of profit to, I think a couple years ago it did $4 million of EBITDA or something in that range. So these, and that business that had 2 employees and 1 or 2 part-time contractors, right? And literally like the entire team could go pens down for 6 months and it would still keep printing cash. And so you look at it and it's like business on hard mode versus business on easy mode. But the inexperienced entrepreneur would look at the bakery and go, ooh, sexy, right? And it's like online, there's bakeries too, right? E-commerce businesses are bakeries in my opinion.

How much of, uh, what was, uh, so for those who don't know Andrew, he took his kind of his holding company, took public, I think today it's trading many hundreds of millions of dollars, $500 or $600 million. What were your earnings that you reported for last quarter, or what's like the public record for your annual earnings? I think it was between $30 and $40 million. That's like the public number, I think. But what's crazy is that we work remotely would have accounted for something like 10 or 15% of, of, you know, this company worth hundreds of millions of dollars of your guys' earnings. That's pretty wild.

Well, and I think a lot of people forget that small things can get big. Right. We grew that. We took that business from $400K. We basically 10xed it and we bought that business, I think, for about $1.5 million. Right. So it's pretty, it's pretty wild how powerful this stuff can be when you see a business where they're just not, they're myopic on something. They're not doing the best practices. And often it's because they have other priorities. I mean, the Basecamp guys had $100 million ARR SaaS business. The last thing they're going to be thinking about is this little pimple on their ass, this, you know, remote job board. Uh, so buying, buying from someone like that is a great opportunity.

I was talking to one of your company CEOs last night and, um, they mentioned this Profit First book, which I think is interesting. Uh, Sam, do you know about this?

Everyone is talking about that. Andrew told me about it months ago, and since then I've seen like 8 or 9 friends bring it up. I don't know what it's about though.

I'll give you my take and then Andrew, you, you fill in the gaps because I haven't read the book, but I was like, can you just explain it to me in 5 seconds? And then they explained it to me in 5 seconds and I was like, oh, got it. And that makes a ton of sense. And so here's the ultra— I haven't read the book version of the book, which is in a normal business, you get revenue top line and then you start, you know, you get your gross profits and like, you know, revenue minus what it took to sell it, to sell those goods. And then you have like all these other expenses and then what, what's left is like the profit at the end. So profits at the end normally, and then you sort of take a distribution out of it. That's probably how you ran The Hustle.

Yeah.

Or you take no distributions cuz you're just paranoid. Um, and that's how I run my e-commerce business. And I think what the Profit First mentality is, you take the gross profit and you put that in your bank account. And then as you have bills to pay, you have to take money.

You literally put it in your bank account or figuratively?

I think you literally move it. You move it into a profit bank account that you don't, you don't see. You sweep it out of the company.

Got it. Okay.

So you sweep it out of the company, then the company gets a bill from some vendor or some software, and then you have to go back and you have to now take money out of that pocket and pay it. And there's something psychological about when you just accept the waterfall of expenses and you're like, I guess I get what's left. You sort of leave the fat in the company versus if I paid you out everything and then I said, hey Sam, um, it's going to be $8,000 to use the software or whatever. Be like, $8 grand for this? I don't wanna— I have to take $8 grand outta my pocket and pay for this? You start to question a bunch of these expenses and it sort of forces you to get lean even though nothing changed except for the order of operations.

But does that ruin growth? Does that, like, does that ruin when you see an opportunity and you wanna pounce on it?

Like, well, well, no, 'cause you would just, you would just, you'd take that money and you'd invest it back into the company.

And first, Andrew, did I, did I bastardize it or was that, was that an accurate description?

I think you nailed it. I mean, the way to think about it is like, if you want to lose weight, you know, there's all these psychological experiments where they give people food on different sizes of plates and the bigger the plate, the more they eat because psychologically, you know, they got to get through all that food. So the idea here is smaller plate. So yeah, you, if you make $100, you immediately take away $30 and people are just forced to eat off of a smaller plate. And so they eat less. And they're more thoughtful about expenses.

But how do you do the math to figure out how much cash to leave in the bank?

Well, I think you would always say that, um, let's say that your business historically has run with a 30% net profit margin. You would always scrape out 30%, and over time, if there's excess cash, they're more profitable, you keep increasing that threshold, right? Because you want to be running as, as, um, as optimal as possible. One of the weirdest things I've noticed in business is that everybody, all CEOs seem to go, you know what, 25% profit. That's good. Let's leave, you know, that, that's what we should manage to. Yeah.

That's how I feel.

I do that. What I've seen is that some of our businesses historically, not at all times, can operate with 80 or 90% net profit margins. And if we got a dreamer in there, right? If we got a CEO like me from 20 years ago or Sean from 20 years ago, we'd be going, oh, let's innovate, let's do all these new things, and they'd burn through all that cash. So I think it's a way of creating discipline. Now, we haven't actually implemented this. I've gone to all the CEOs and asked them to read it, and some of them have got excited and implemented it. But, um, I think it's a really interesting framework, especially for smaller companies.

Our buddy, uh, Sully does this. So I was like, how much working— because like our e-com bank balance is getting bigger— I was like, how much should I leave in there versus, uh, you know, distribute out? And he was like, I just distributed it all out. And I was like, all of it? Like, what about like 3 months of working capital? And he's like, okay, you can leave a month or 2. But he's like, people act like you can't just put money back in the bank account. Like, you can always put money back in the bank account. There's no penalty for this. And he's like, I think you have way better discipline when there's not this huge bank balance sitting there. And, you know, and I was like, oh, okay, I guess you're right. There is no like penalty or, you know, for just sending the money back into the bank account when it's needed. But you will question, is this really needed? And why is this needed? And what happened last month that is leading us to inject capital back in?

I've like yelled at Sam over text a few times about this.

Many times.

Super conservative.

I'm really conservative. I've changed though. So starting January 1st, we're making the change where I'm taking out a lot of the money and we're actually just putting it into like T-bills into a different account to figure out what do we want to do with the money. Um, maybe we'll pay ourselves a little bit. I haven't paid myself anything from Hampton at the moment, but maybe we'll pay ourselves money as well. But yeah, I'm, I'm, you've convinced me that that's the right way and I'm good. I have to read this book. What I'm still trying to figure out is how much capital to keep in the business. I don't know if I want to, like, do you, so let's say your business is, is spending $500,000 a month in expenses. Do you just leave in like one month's expense? What's the equation for—

Chris and I, we used to leave two weeks expenses. In the business.

No way. Really?

If it meant that if they don't collect their AR, their accounts receivable, they go off a cliff. Now what they don't know is they're not going to go off a cliff because Tiny, the bank, will just inject more capital. We're sitting on cash and so we move it in, but it creates this sense of urgency to do collections and run the business very efficiently.

So that math is basically if you're doing, uh, uh, $12.5 million in revenue, you have $10 million in profit, you're only leaving something like $500 grand in the bank.

Yeah. Yeah. So like basically payroll, payroll plus expenses for 2 to 4 weeks max.

That's wild. That's stressful. But I agree. That's the right way to do it.

It's not. Well, it's not though, because I mean, most of the time, especially in a recurring revenue business, right? Like we'll do this with, especially with SaaS businesses because it's very predictable. We will say, okay, um, you know, you always do 300K MRR. So, you know, we're going to give you, you know, 2 weeks of cash because it's very predictable. Now, once in a while, maybe once a year, they'll say, hey, can you inject 100K to help us make payroll or something like that? Or for R&D. But to go back to Sean's point, they have to validate the R&D, whereas if the money is there, they'll just take it and do the R&D.

Are you going to do this, Sean?

Yeah, I'm going to change it because I am like very guilty of this. Like when I heard this, It was like, oh, I've heard a truth I can't unhear. And this is for bootstrap companies specifically, um, because, you know, otherwise, yeah, I don't want to belabor the point, but yeah, like, the— it's so easy to just accept all your expenses as expenses that are necessary or required. It's easy to— oh, what's the difference between this much net profit per month or this much? I'm not taking it out anyway, so I don't really feel the difference. Whereas if If my paycheck is less, I'm like, where's the rest of it? And then I have to go answer that question. And so I think this is such a— I look for forcing functions and I think this is an amazing forcing function that initially I was ready to poo-poo this book. I was like, what is this stupid idea? And then as soon as I heard it, flipped my opinion.

There's a really good quote on that. I was talking to a friend about this who runs a SaaS company. I won't say who, but he has 65% net margins and he's been running this SaaS business for 20+ years, growing, you know, 20, 30% bootstrapped every year. Just amazing, amazing business and great entrepreneur. And I was telling him about how we had not done this in certain businesses and how the CEOs had misallocated some of that cash. And he looks at me and he just goes, If you ask the dinner guests what's for dinner, they will always say steak. And I was like, oh my God, that's so true. Right. It's like, why wouldn't they? You know, it's not their money. They, you know, yes, don't get me wrong. Like a CEO is incentivized for a bonus, but for a CEO's bonus, they can spend $300,000 of your money. And that might only be worth $10,000 or $20,000 bonus for them. They don't care as much. Um, you know, every dollar counts when it's you and you're the owner-operator.

I did the same thing when I sold my house. I was like, okay, I forgot we were selling it for like, let's say it was 2.1. And I was like, I think we could get 2.2. And the agent was like, I don't know, maybe it's 2.1. And I was like, well, I get it. You want to make the sale and move on. But I was like, you know, and I thought, oh, we're both aligned. If it's 2.2, he gets more and I get more. And I realized, well, this guy gets 3%. He gets an extra $3,000. I get an extra $97,000. If it's 2.1. I was like, this guy doesn't give a shit about that 3 grand. You know, he's getting whatever, you know, 3% of the $2 million anyways. This 3 grand is like not worth the time and hassle and risk of pushing a negotiation. And so I incentivized him. I was like, how about this? Let's cut a new deal. He's ready for me to like cut him down. And I go, no, for every dollar you get me above 2.1, you're going to keep 15% of it. And sure enough, and I made him— I also had a penalty. I said, And if you don't sell it for at least 2.1, you got to buy my wife this bag. And I was like, because I was like, I don't want to take money out of this guy's pocket, but I also want him to feel the pain. So I made it a goofy gift. I was like, you are like these like expensive slippers that like clearly are a waste of fucking money. And he was like, and then literally we got down to it. We got an offer. It was around 2.12, let's say. And, uh, I was honestly ready to take it at that point, but he was like He was like, it's about 2.1. I don't know, like, you know, let's see if we can push back. He's like, I really don't want to buy that bag. So he's like, I'm going to for sure get it over this. He's like, let me see how far I can get it. And he said, let me go push one more time. And he pushed one more time. We got a better deal. And it was just such a simple, like, lesson around really understanding the incentives and not just like the, like, on-paper incentives, but like, is this enough to move the needle for this person to behave differently or not?

I think it's so crazy. The more that I go through working with other people in business, I realize that everything comes down to incentives. And if you just think about the incentive, you'll see the, you know, the exact behavior that they're going to have. I did the same thing when I was selling a house. Chris had an interesting point. He was making stink bids on houses. So if you look at like a million-dollar house, he would go and he'd bid $650,000 or $700,000, and he'd do that 10 or 20 times, and the realtor was pushing back over and over and over again. Oh, you know, they'll never accept that. There's no point because think about it. The realtor's got to go. They got to spend 30 to 40 minutes writing out the offer, send it. And for them, they're going, there's 5% chance. Totally worth it for Chris, but not for the realtor. And they're only going to get one commission. And so Chris started saying, hey, look, for every offer you send, I'm going to pay you $1,000. Immediately the guy's totally down to do the stink bids. But before that, he's going, oh, you're going to get a bad reputation in the market. You're going to offend everyone. Don't do it. It's so funny.

I don't know if this is public, so Sean will have to verify because he's closer to this person. But we've got buddies that if you're like, I've been with them in LA when we were there doing like an event or when they're visiting New York, you'll be like, hey, what are you doing today? Like, oh, I'm going to go see these 3 apartments or these 3 houses that I'm looking at. And I was like, You're looking to move? He's like, no, I just tour these constantly and I put lowball offers on all of them. And every once in a while someone will, will take the bait and I get a, a screaming deal. Is that right, Sean? Is that what they do?

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

And they just like are doing these, doing this constantly and they do the exact same thing. Has any of those stink bids ever worked?

Yeah. I mean, dude, it's just like some people like bargain shopping at Ross, trying to find that hidden gem that's in the basket that they know is worth more. Some people like to go to garage sales. And then if you're just a little bit richer, you do the same thing on the level of houses. Essentially, you're like, oh good, if I can lowball these houses, you know, touring houses is also pretty fun. And yeah, they've, they've picked up a couple of assets.

We have a mutual friend, all of us, and he buys companies and he was telling me what his funnel was. He basically said, I think they own 18 companies. He said that they looked at 1,000 companies and I think they met with hundreds, many, many hundreds. And then he said they did LOIs for like 200 of them. And only 15 or 18 or something like that closed. And I didn't realize, Andrew, how much— all right, when I think of like a holding company or whatever you're doing, I think of it this way, mostly because you give off this vibe, which I think you mean to do it on purpose, but I don't think it's the reality, which is like, oh, I just sit back and everyone does the work. And maybe they're doing a lot of the work running the companies. But what I've learned about buying companies, and I think Sean's learning this too, because I know he's meeting with a lot of people. It is a sales job and you are hitting the phones and you are creating a funnel and that funnel still has like a 3% conversion rate. So in order to buy 3 companies, you got to talk to 100 people. I didn't realize how sales-oriented this whole thing was that you guys are doing.

Well, for us, I wouldn't say it is. I would say in the early days it was for sure. But we've realized that like cold outreach is not the way to go. Like we would much rather go and have a public presence and a reputation and have people actually seek us out and say, Hey, I want to sell you my company. I want to connect with you. I don't want to be some random private equity firm that's like, hey, you know, let me tell you about us and do the dog and pony show and stuff.

I want to develop— you're still doing marketing. So instead of doing, instead of doing sales, you're doing marketing. The funnel still exists.

Yeah, totally.

And I did not realize that. Have you noticed that, Sean, while you're trying to buy stuff?

Yeah. I mean, we just started this process, let's say a year ago, very much inspired by you, Andrew, of like, uh, Hey, this is a wonderful way to basically like own businesses without having to create them from scratch. Gives a good win to the person who's selling them. We will buy minority, which I don't know if you guys always do, but like we will also buy minority of them, minority stake in them. But the thing that's— yeah, Sam, you're absolutely right. It's obviously like you have to sort through so many just to find something worth buying. And then even when you find something worth buying doesn't mean the deal is going to happen. Even when you think a deal is going to happen, it doesn't mean a deal closes. And so you end up with this like tiny, tiny funnel and you have to be okay with like, hey, we might do one deal this year or no deals this year. It's so different than like entrepreneurship where it's all about action, it's all about features, it's all about, you know, more customers, more, more, more, more, more. And actually less, less, less is almost, you know, the name of the game when it comes to being very selective, picking the right asset.

The hard part, I think, is a lot of people overinvest in building that funnel and they have a lot of conversations. And what I've done is when someone emails me and they say, hey, I want to sell you my business, I'll say, okay, hey, I want to make sure I don't waste any of your time. And so tell me these 3 things. So it'll be like, okay, who runs the business, right? Is that you? Do you want to stay or go? And then what are your earnings? And then after that, once I have that info, I say, okay, we would probably pay about X. Right. And if they say, you know, let's talk, then I know I should spend the time and talk. But I think a lot of people will actually have 3 or 4 conversations and like slow roll. And I'm like, I'm like via email, I want to send the first offer. I want them to say, yes, that's interesting. And then I'll spend time on it. And what I used to do is I would spend all this time getting to know people and unboxing the business only to realize that their expectations were insane and we would waste a ton of time. And just like with, um, Bidding on real estate or anything else, we throw out LOIs constantly. Like I have no qualms about that. They're not binding documents. You know, we'll send someone an offer and there's something about if I, if I write an email and I say, hey, I'll offer you $2 million for your business. I don't think people take it as seriously as when there's like a formal document laying it all out. Hey, on April 30th, you will get $2 million in this exact structure. This is what we commit to. People take it seriously. So we, we send them out all the time.

So I've never told this story, I don't think publicly, but Sean, about 4 or 6 years ago, The Hustle was 2 or 3 years old. I was down in the dumps. I was feeling really bad about myself. I was feeling bad about the business. And I told this person that I was not feeling great. And they said, you know, have you thought about selling it? I would really be interested in buying it. And this guy, um, I'm I was like, oh, maybe. He goes, look, let's just hang out and meet. Come up to where I am and fly up here. And I was like, okay, maybe. And he goes, yeah, yeah, I'm going to send the jet. I'm going to send you a jet. And I was like, what do you mean a jet? Like, I get, like, I'm going to fly private? Like, yeah, I'm sending the jet. So I take all these, this is right when TikTok came out. I remember one of the first TikToks was me on this jet. It was like, I was like, I can't believe this. I go to the private executive airport, my first time ever doing that. I get on the plane, I'm in my own jet. I have got the Wall Street Journal sitting there and they offer me like champagne and all this stuff. I'm like, this is the craziest thing. I can't believe this. I was in heaven. I meet with the guy and I'm wooed. I'm so floored by this. And I'm like days away from being like, yeah, I'm willing to do something. Then thankfully I snap out of the, the, the mood and I'm like, it's okay. I can keep going. But that, my friends, is how I met Andrew Wilkinson in real life. He was the one who sent me the jet. He sent me a jet and he totally wine and dined me. I was such a redneck. He goes, I lived in San Francisco. He goes, oh, I'm in Vancouver. I was like, I gotta go to New York though. And I don't wanna have to, like, I guess I'll fly to New York and then you could send the jet and we'll just bolt right up. And I was thinking Vancouver was Toronto. I didn't, I thought Vancouver was next to New York. I didn't even know where it was. He goes, dude, Vancouver's right by San Francisco. It's only gonna be 2 or 3 hours. But, uh, he flew me up there and I don't know if you owned a bakery at the time. You took me to a bakery and you guys totally tried to like wine and dine me. That's how I met Andrew. I was like head over heels just 'cause he sent this jet. It worked.

You know, that's actually the only time I've ever done that. I think that's because you are so full of shit. No, I'm 100%.

I'm—

I've picked up friends and we've done that kind of stuff before. Like if we're having an event, we've flown people in. But I've only ever done that for you. That's the one time. And I think it was because you said you were afraid of flying or there's—

It totally worked.

It totally worked. I'm afraid of flying commercial. If only there was some other option.

At the time I was thinking about, uh, I was thinking a lot about newspapers and I was like, oh, Sam, you've built like the modern version of the newspaper. You've got something really incredible. I think your deal with HubSpot though is better than what we would have paid. Well, and it was like, we got to the numbers and we would have been cheaper than HubSpot.

Well, and it was like, I think a 2-year difference. I remember we, I went to, I even, I was supposed to get married on a Friday or Saturday and you wanted to meet me on a Tuesday. And I was like, Sarah, you think I could swing this? This guy's going to fly. Fly me private. I gotta do this. Well, you know, I'm, I'll be, I'll, I'll miss maybe one of the events. I have to do this. And it was like, uh, so that was in 2020. And so we ended up selling a little bit later. So it worked out for everyone. But that's how I met you.

I will say one of the things I've learned from you, Andrew, is, uh, you are a master networker. And normally networking is like this, it's like this compliment you don't want to get. Um, you know, but, but you're actually great at it. And obviously networking is valuable. People would love to have a great network. And meet cool people and have excuses to do things together. And I've seen you kind of throw your weight around in that area. And this might be like asking Michael Jordan, like, you know, how do you shoot a jump shot? Or how do you jump so high? You know, like, it's like they can't really explain. It's not conscious or that they don't really know how to explain it. But I've seen you do this with like, you want to meet somebody who's really interesting and you'll find a good excuse to get connected with them, or even how we met. Like, you know, you listen to the podcast and then you were like, hey, I'd love to, you know, meet you. Let's do a call. And you really kind of like took the time to do something that you didn't otherwise have to do. And that's how we met. We had a great conversation. Then that led to kind of like us hanging out a little bit more. And so I've seen you do this with like pretty influential people. I've seen you bring people up to Canada where you're at, like, you know, the sort of home court advantage type of thing, like Do you have, if I was to say like, you know, how do you do it? And by the way, I asked the, when I was having dinner with the CEO of one of your companies the other day, they said the same thing. They go, nobody's better than Andrew when it comes to building an awesome network.

Who'd you meet, by the way?

Zach, he lives like a minute away from us.

So what's your first date routine for meeting all these people and building a network?

Well, it totally depends. I mean, I am so Here's an example. So in 2016, I was reading a profile on Dan Gilbert. Sean, I— or Sam, I think, you know, or both of you guys know who he is. He's the Quicken Loans Rocket Mortgage guy. And it was really cool. It was all about how he'd taken his entire fortune and basically was trying to rebuild the city of Detroit. And I thought that was really cool. I thought, you know, you see all these guys who get super rich and then they put their money into like mutual funds, right? I think that's incredibly boring. This guy's trying to rebuild a city. He's buying skyscrapers. He's starting all these businesses. So I just emailed him. I cold emailed him at like 1 in the morning and I said, hey, you know, here's 3 bullets about me. And I thought about what is he interested in? And so I mentioned that I own that bakery. I mentioned I'm passionate about my city. I mentioned I bootstrapped my business, you know, tried to find a few points of similarity and said, I would love to meet you anytime, anywhere. You know, if you're going to be in a random city in Del— you know, somewhere in Delaware, I will fly to you. Just tell me when we could meet. And I got an email response back like 20 minutes later saying sure. And we ended up meeting up in Detroit and he was amazing. We spent an afternoon together, gave me a tour of the city, got to know a whole bunch of people on his team and it was awesome. So I will shoot shots like that when I see someone that I'm interested in. But there's certain people that are like inaccessible, like I wanted to meet Bill Ackman. I'd, you know, been reading about him for years, been following, you know, watching every YouTube video, listening to every interview. And first I was like, okay, he's an investor in Chipotle. Maybe we could redesign. I own all these agencies. Maybe we could redesign the Chipotle website. Maybe we could do an app. And so I email him and I say, hey, I'm a shareholder in your public company. You know, I've got this amazing design agency. I'd love to help in any way I can. And he intros me to like one of the board members. So I was like, damn it, you know, like I just got handed off.

But he, but he, he replied to the email though. That was good.

I mean, he replied to the email. He just, yeah, he basically just forwarded it to somebody, but I was like, okay, I know his email, like there's something will happen here and I just have to wait for it. And then I saw this charity lunch go up and basically every year he auctions off a lunch and this, year. This was in like 2017. He was having a terrible down year. He got divorced. He had like the Herbalife stuff. He invested in Valiant Pharmaceutical. Everyone was kind of like shitting on him. He was being very quiet. And so there weren't as many bids as usual to do this. And so I ended up bidding $57,000 to go have lunch with him. And my bet was I had no, I had no expectation there'd be any business to do. Because he's a hedge fund manager. I'm a tech investor, but, but I knew he'd be like an interesting person to meet. And so I went and we ended up connecting. And then at the end of the lunch, he kind of pulled me aside and he's like, hey, I like you. If you ever want to do a deal together, let me know. And so years later, we ended up buying a business and he invested with us.

Just like slips you a piece of paper and says, do you like me back? Yes or no?

Like, stick the box twice.

Yeah. Well, See, that's what I'm talking about. That's amazing. You did the same thing, I think, with Charlie Munger and Buffett, right? You did the charity lunch. You bought the charity lunch. Is that right?

No, no. So that was a friend, just a, that was totally random. That was my friend Andrew Marks, who he knew Charlie personally and he said, hey, I'm putting together a dinner. And then through that, you know, I started sending Charlie letters. I knew that Charlie is not someone you communicate verbally with. He likes to talk a lot. And so and you can't communicate it with him that way. You got to write him letters. So Chris and I started writing him letters. But, but yeah, I mean, I don't know. I like people. I'm very extroverted.

What are you saying in these letters?

I would just say like, hey, before the dinner, I said, hey, here's who we are. This is the business. This is what we do. And he, you know, throughout the dinner, knew who we were as a result. And then we started asking for his opinions and talking about different ways we could help him with stuff. I think like the fundamental principle is be of value to other people. And then also, um, say yes to interesting people. If someone can, if someone appears to be interesting, I will have lunch with them.

Did he reply to the letters?

He would just call us. We would, we then we'd call him and he would verbally, he's, he like verbally, um, he'll communicate to you verbally, but you have to write to him if you want to remember him to remember anything.

That's amazing.

Uh, sounds like a book, like, uh, like my pen pal Charlie, you know, you got to like save all the letters in the back and forth.

Totally. I think, uh, it's great to see, you know, like I would say there's like two takeaways for me. One is like, I feel like you check your ego really well. Like, uh, you are humble about wanting to meet these people and you're open about wanting to meet these people and you're not like, you're not beyond, you're not like above just shooting a shot and saying, hey, you know, I think you're great. Here's what we do that might be relevant for you and helpful for you. Uh, you know, we'd love to connect. I think the other thing is, um, you're willing to spend money, you're willing to hop on the flight, you're willing to buy the charity thing, you're willing to, to, to be a part of their, their program that they're launching because, you know, they care about that right now. And, uh, I think people are pretty— everybody sort of understands that like having a valuable network is valuable, but very few people are willing to invest because it's not a clear like dollars in, dollars out thing. And that's one thing I've picked up from you.

You got to be really careful about it though, because so about 12, 13 years ago, I remember when I was first starting my company, I would watch TED Talks back when they were like really early. And I would always go, oh my God, I want to be in this room. Like, who are these people? It's like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and, you know, all these amazing people. And so probably like 13, 14 years ago, I started going to TED.

Global.

And I started at the kind of baby event, the junior one, uh, the only one I could get into. And then I slowly worked my way into going to the main event because I met Chris Anderson who ran TED, and I pitched him on doing a TED app. And so I designed the TED app. I used that to get into the main one. And then I ended up meeting all these interesting people. And so that was an example where I belonged, but I was like the baby. I was like the kid who's like, you know, people would ruffle my hair. Oh, isn't that cute? This 23-year-old with a cracking voice runs a company. But I kind of belong. So I think that's a great strategy sometimes, but this year I went to the Oscars and I went to the Vanity Fair afterparty, and that was an example of something where I'm like, I should not be here. And you do not want that experience, right?

That's not a good story. Tell that story.

So yeah, so it was really random. So I was at a conference about a year ago. And I sat across from this guy and I asked him about his startup. And usually when you're at these conferences, they're like, oh, I own a B2B software company for doing HR or something. And this guy said something that really caught my attention. He goes, I run a startup that helps people convert money into an interesting life. And I was like, whoa, okay, what is this? And so he has this company called Myria. M-Y-R-I-A. And the idea is basically they deep dive with you on, you know, what do you care about? What are you excited about? What do you want your life to look like? So they kind of like paint out a blueprint, like in 2 years, you know, do you want to be, what kind of people do you want to be hanging out with? What do you aspire to get involved with? You know, what are your passions? What do you want to do with your money? And then they help you figure that out. And so I did it. I signed up. And they interviewed me and I said, I love movies. And they said, well, do you want to go to the Oscars? And I was like, I've never contemplated that, but I was like, you know what? That sounds like a fun experience. I think spending money on funny experiences like that is worth it. And so we go, me and my girlfriend go down, they set up like a personal stylist. We buy like ridiculously expensive clothes and tuxedos. And, you know, I get like a $500 haircut, like just silly, silly stuff. And, you know, it's, it's kind of cool. We're in the actual Oscar event and we keep seeing famous people and it's great people watching and stuff. But after that, we go to the Vanity Fair afterparty. And I don't know if you guys know, but Vanity Fair afterparty is this like super exclusive event where literally everybody is famous. If there's 5 people there, 4 of them are B or A-list celebrities. And the one that you don't recognize is probably like a super famous director or producer or something. So I'm standing at the bar and like to my right is Jon Hamm chatting it up with Jeff Bezos. Uh, you know, I see this guy checking out my girlfriend and I realized it's Andrew Garfield, like very weird. I can hear like Seth Rogen laughing behind me. Rihanna struts in, like, it's just pinch me, like the weirdest thing in the world. And then there's me and my girlfriend. And over and over again, every person that walks by us looks us up and down, looks a bit excited, looks us up and down, realizes we're not famous, and then immediately turns on their heel. And we're just like, you know, this is kind of weird. We don't belong here. And I start making conversation with people. I'm, you know, I'm very social. I start trying to chit-chat with people. And as soon as I said, oh, I'm not in the film industry, I'm in tech. People would just immediately glaze over and start looking over my shoulder, like did not care, could not care less. Right. And you know, it was, I kind of gave up at a certain point. I just kind of was like, all right, let's just people watch or whatever. But I realized that I'm really used to being in rooms where like, obviously I'm not famous, but I have like respect. Like, you know, if I, even if I'm at a dental conference, I can probably chat with someone and be like, Oh, you're the, like, you know, you're the business guy at the dentist, at the dentist, you know, clinic or whatever. We can talk business. But I realized I had no shared language for these people. And it's just not fun. Like, you want to be in a room where you actually have value. And so imagine, like, I was a web designer and I'm like, I want to be an investor. I want to meet Bill Ackman. If I have no value to him or I'm not interested in him, I should not meet him. You have to wait until you're interesting. And ironically, since I went to the Oscars, we ended up buying Letterboxd, which is a social network. It's like the largest social network for film buffs. Now, if I go back to that same party, I'm sure people would be like, oh, cool. Right. But it's interesting.

You had a great phrase. You said, you said, I realize that you want to earn the room that you're in. And I thought that was like, because I didn't know at first, like, what was the takeaway of the story? Is it just like You know, I don't know. Sometimes you go to these parties, you feel uncomfortable, but you're, you're actually right about that. You do want to, you don't want to buy your way into a room. You want to earn your way into a room. And, uh, I do think that that's a, that's a great takeaway.

Listen to the, uh, the copy on the Myria. So it's myria.us. It says Parker Wayne Kent Stark. Why should they have all the fun? Myria memberships gives you and your team special powers to make your life more enjoyable and the world a better place. And they say. Say open sesame to the world's top private clubs and make sold out disappear from your vocabulary.

Well done.

This is a very well done site. Is this, is this company going to be something legit and big? I know they went through Y Combinator.

We talked about them a couple episodes ago too.

I think, um, I think it's a really, really cool idea. And I think the idea, like, do you ever go to a city and you're like, shit, you know, we didn't plan. Like, I remember me and my girlfriend went to Tokyo. And we kind of went last minute and we ended up eating bad food. We didn't really like see the best of the city. We just hadn't planned it. And so it was just so wasted. And it's one of those instances where I wish I had something like this. It's like the key to the city where you're like, hey, I'm in Tokyo. I want to go to all the coolest stuff. You know, all my tastes, curate something for me. Or like Chris wanted to go to F1 and he doesn't know anyone at F1. He doesn't know how it works. He wanted to go last minute. These guys got him like, I think he met Lewis Hamilton. He went in the pit, you know, stuff like that is like pretty cool. But I, yeah, it would be interesting to see because they raised venture. We actually invested in their, their angel round immediately because I was like, this is such a funny idea. But I don't know if it'll be venture scale. We'll see.

They have a competitor that I looked at and I was poking around the website. They say you have to spend $80,000 a month in order to make it be worth it. So on average, $1 million a year. To make these.

Yeah, $25,000. I think it's $25,000 and then they take a cut of everything you do. So if you spend $100,000, I think they would take a 15% fee or something on that. There's another service I just got invited to and my friend, so he tells me about it and it's basically last minute, super high-end reservations at any restaurant you want to eat at in like New York, London, and Miami. And I'm like, oh cool, you should invite me. And he's like, no, you don't get it. If you don't use this invite, I lose access and the guy who invited me loses access, which I think is like genius. So it's like, forget what it's called, but basically you, if I invite Sean, um, you have to use it within 30 days. Otherwise I lose my access. And if Sam invited me, he loses it too.

There's some, uh, little trend I've noticed, which is people as they get more successful or notable or whatever, the number of times they hear no in their life goes way down. And I've actually noticed that there's a whole business in just the business of no for people that no longer hear no. And what this means is twofold. One is they still run into some things that they don't know how to— they can't— their powers are useless here. It's like, oh, it's sold out. What do you want me to do? And so these guys with Myria have created a business around, we eliminate the last few nos of your life. And I've noticed other people like this kind of, uh, hey, if you don't use this, I get kicked out. It's like, I don't get kicked out of anything nowadays, right? Like I'm paying the fees. Why would they kick me out? But there's a whole business around give people something to lose who never hear no anymore. They never get rejected anymore. And it's like, give them some rejection, give them some way that they have some, some risk, uh, because it makes them sort of like feel like something matters when everything is an easy mode for them at that point.

I, um, I, I've been on the waitlist to go to Peter. Do you guys know who Peter Attia is? Super famous doctor. Um, I, I, um, I've been on the waitlist there for like 3 years.

His private practice, you mean?

Private, private practice, which is like, you know, I think he only has 50 patients.

It's like getting, it's like getting Huberman or someone to be your doctor.

Yeah.

It's super expensive. And so I pay, I pay like this absurd amount of money upfront and they do this thing where they psychologically test you before they allow you to become a patient. And so I go through this test and Peter calls me and he goes, Andrew, um, there was something concerning in your, uh, your personality test. I'm worried that you won't have good follow-through. Will you do what I say? Will you execute on the plan? And I'm like, Peter, no, like you got it all wrong. Like I, I pay attention to my diet. Like I track everything. I wear a glucose monitor. Like you don't have to worry about me. And he goes, okay, cool. And so, you know, I've been working with them and last month I pull him aside and I'm like, Peter, look, be honest with me. Did I actually have like something in my psychological test? And he goes, you did. I was like, is that even a real test? And he's like, yeah, that is right. So I actually did flag something, but I was thinking what a great strategy, because I'm like the dream patient now. I'm like terrified of getting booted out because of this. Thing he said. And I think doing something like that, you're right, pushing someone away creates this desire to be a good customer.

Has it been worth it? His, his, him being your doctor?

Well, I think, I think it's, so it's a lot of money, obviously it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if, think about it this way, if you're gaining 5 years of life or 10 years of life, what is that worth? And there's been quite a few things I have. I have an amazing doctor. A primary doctor that I go to, who I love and he's amazing, but at Tia, they have like a neurologist, a cardiologist, exercise physiologist who works with you. So it's this team of people and they caught a bunch of issues with cholesterol and other stuff that I may not have caught otherwise. So I mean, I think it's worth it, but for a normal person, is that a good use of money? No, I would say that's a crazy use of money.

You went to your primary doctor, you're like, doc, I love you. It's been a great 20 years.

Yeah, we have to talk.

I met Angelina Jolie now, and, uh, we have a thing going too. We're now in an open doctor relationship. It's really—

yeah, it's one of those things. I used to think you could only have one lawyer. Like, I had one, one lawyer, and then I'd feel like I was cheating on my lawyer if I used other lawyers. Then I realized, like, no, you have lawyers for different things or whatever. But yeah, I have, uh, now I've got a polyamorous, uh, doctor relationship.

Let's do, uh, you have this, this idea of be the barnacle on the whale. What does that mean?

Yeah, so, um, if you think about one of the biggest costs in most businesses, it's marketing. So, um, you know, if you think about it, it's like 15 to 30% of most businesses is just getting people to know you exist and getting sales. So if you can own a business that doesn't have to market itself, then you're golden. You can run a super, super profitable business. So let's say that with marketing, you run at 15%, cut marketing, you could run at 45%, 50%, 60%. So for example, let's say that you're a fitness influencer. So like, think about like Derek from More Plates, More Dates. So he sells supplements and energy drinks. And he's got this shampoo for hair loss. He's got a great business because he has free marketing. He just talks about the product on his podcast, his YouTube, uh, his Instagram, and he gets free sales, right? So it would be an— as an e-commerce business, if he was paying to acquire those customers, it'd be a crappy business. But he's got free marketing right now. The problem is most of us don't have access to that. Most of us are not influencers, but anyone can do that in a different way by being a barnacle on a whale. So here's the story of how we— I kind of stumbled into this. So I was at a conference about 12 years ago. At the time, I met Harley and Toby from Shopify. Shopify was this tiny little startup. They were bootstrapped. They were like 15 people. And they said, hey, we really like your design work. Would you design some themes for us? But there's a catch. This won't be client work. We're not going to pay you. Uh, we want you to list them in our marketplace. So the idea is like when people sign up for Shopify, they wanted people to be able to select a theme and pay like $49 to $250 to do that. I started making $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month as these themes sold. And I was like, hey, this is really cool. Like, I'm not having to promote it. I don't have to think about marketing or SEO or anything. You know, people, they, they send all the traffic to their marketplace. And so we started building more and more themes and we ended up spinning out that business. But what I didn't realize was that in the theme marketplace, there was only so many squares and it took time to build the themes and it took time for them to get approved. And so I started owning more and more squares. So let's say that in the early days, if you were to choose a theme, there's a 50% chance that it was one of ours. So we had like saturation early in this marketplace that was very small when we joined it. But then as Shopify grew, I mean, you guys know what happened. They go public, they start pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing. I get free marketing. I get to be the little barnacle on the whale and keep growing. And it got to the point where that business was big enough that we ended up taking that public at a $260 million valuation a couple years ago. So it's an incredible strategy. Now, I think Shopify is hard because you're late. You know, the marketplace already exists. It takes a lot of time to get approved. You know, that might not be the place to go. Where you might want to look is like Discord or Adapar or any kind of software ecosystem that's not super saturated. If you can go be a barnacle on a whale, you can make a ton of money.

I totally agree. I have a business that's cooking up that's like this. I'll tell you later offline because I can't I can't announce it yet, but totally agree with this strategy. I think it's amazing. You invested, so you said it went public at $260 million. How much did you invest to get there? It sounds like it was kind of some free labor to get the themes going, but like how much capital did it take for you to get going? Because you were early.

$20,000 maybe.

So that's incredible.

And didn't you sell, you sold that business for $15 million or did you sell it for $10 and bought it back for $15? There was like a story where you sold it and then bought it back, right?

Yeah. So basically started it for $20K, sold it for about $7 million. Um, and then I ended up buying it back from the guys who bought it for $25 million. And then about a year later, we took it public for $260 million.

So talk about that. Like, did you sell it? Like, did you regret selling it or what? Why sell it in the first place? Was that a mistake? And then psychologically, how'd you get yourself to buy it back for 3 times as much?

Yeah, like Sam, I was like in this kind of like existential crisis. I was super burnt out. I've been running, so I, I had that business, I had MetaLab, I had two SaaS companies, I had an e-commerce business. I was running all of them, kind of running around like a chicken with my head cut off. And finally I hit a wall and I was feeling really depressed. Talked to a friend, he said, hey, why don't you sell one?

And, um, were you, were you liquid at that point? Like, were you financially secure?

No, no, I was liquid in that we had a lot of cash flow, but the problem was I'd be borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, right? So I have at any given time, I'd have a highly profitable business and then I'd have a startup and the startup would burn all the profits. So I didn't have a nice house. Like, you know, I was okay, but I always felt like I was going to go broke. And so getting that cash influx was amazing. So I sell the business. Suddenly I'm sitting on millions of dollars and feeling very secure. And the first thing I do is I go, okay, now that I've got all this money, I gotta learn how to invest it. And so I pick up a book about Warren Buffett and I start reading about this idea of competitive advantage and moats and what a good business looks like. And as I'm reading, I'm going, oh my God, I just sold the business that has all these qualities. What the hell was I thinking? And I was still on the board. So the nice thing was I helped them choose the CEO, this amazing guy named Ben Moore, and I just kept watching. And eventually the guys who we sold it to, they were fatigued. They wanted to— they had, they had, um, they had kind of transitioned to doing something different. So they wanted to sell the business. And so I just stepped on their foot. I said, hey, if you guys want to sell, we'll do a deal. And so we did. And then we did a bunch of M&A and, you know, packaged it up and took it public.

That's insane.

So the $20K you invested was the initial amount, but then you bought it back for $25 and then you guys bought a bunch of other Shopify plugins and apps, right?

Yeah.

I think our total amount, if you look at it from that perspective, our total amount of investment was about $36 million. So we, we took it, you know, start, started it for $20K, sold it for $7, bought it back for $25, did $10 million or so of M&A, and then took it public. And we optimized the business and grew it quite a bit over that year.

God, that's awesome. That's a, that's a, that's a good insight. I mean, I remember seeing like the press release for Pixel Union and I remember you talking about it, but I didn't know that you actually had to buy it back for more than you sold it for.

Yeah, it was 5x basically.

It's insane. Um, Sean, where do you wanna go from here?

Let's do the, the life philosophy. So you said, uh, people always suffer in silence. What does this mean?

Yeah, it's something Chris and I have noticed. So we have this real culture of autonomy at Tiny. So we always say that when we hire a CEO, we leave them alone. And there's certain people who really love that. So for example, often founders who sell their company to us, when a founder sells their company to us and keeps running it, often they sold because they wanted to buy out a co-founder or they wanted to buy out their VCs and they wanted to operate the business profitably. So they're kind of saying, look, I've got this great business. I know what I'm doing. I want an investor who's going to leave me alone. I just want to buy out these guys. I want to buy out a co-founder or something. And so, um, usually those guys, they just want to be left alone. And we say, great. Um, talk to us if you need anything and, uh, you know, sail off into the sunset and run your business. That works fine. But often when we hire a CEO, they're used to having, um, somebody who oversees them. So like a really active board or before they were in like some big corporation and there's constantly someone checking in. And so they associate check-ins with everything is okay. And we don't do that. We literally throw people in the pool and we say, okay, go and swim, do whatever you need to do. And, um, and so often, and because there's so many companies, there's 40 companies now in Tiny, there's always someone we forgot about that we're not checking in on. We're not texting. They've just fallen off our radar or we think they're okay. And so we look at their numbers and they seem to be good. We assume everything is fine. And so we just say, you know, they're not contacting us. Let's leave them alone. Well, so often we found that people will fester in silence. They will actually assume that, um, here I am, I'm doing this great job for them and they won't even do me the honor of picking up the phone or checking in or, um, you know, whatever it is. And, and it's this, I always, I remember about 10 years ago. I was complaining. I was, um, I was hurt. Somebody I'd sent someone, uh, an emotional email and they didn't respond. And my friend says, do you know what Hanlon's Razor is? And basically the idea is it's, um, never attribute to malice what can otherwise be explained by ignorance or stupidity. Right. So never assume negative intent, but everybody assumes negative intent. You know, we all know what it's like to send an email that's really important to us. And the person doesn't respond for 3 or 4 days, you assume that they're going, you know, fuck this person, or I'm going to ice them out. In reality, they're busy. They've got kids, they're doing their email, they're, they're behind, whatever it is. And so I've just observed this fact. I don't know what to do about it, but people will always assume silence equals malice.

And then you have this other one that says people don't change. So you first said people always suffer. Or people suffer in silence and people don't change. You're getting a little pessimistic on that. But I agree with you. I, there's this author called Robert Greene. He's got, you know, 48 Laws of Power and he has this other book called Human Nature. And he's like, why should you study human nature? Because very rarely do people change. It's the same stuff over and over and over again. And then when you look at their individual habits, whatever they've done in the past, they're going to just do. Assume it's going to happen again and again and again in the future.

That's one of the best, that's one of the best books I've ever read. The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. I just got the audiobook and I just keep listening to it every year. It's amazing. I've just seen this over and over again. I find that you rarely hire someone and let's say like, you know, I love to hire people based on scrappiness. Will they figure things out? Will they learn? Do they have high pace? I've never hired someone who doesn't have high pace and then coached them into having high pace, right? People either do or they don't. And the only thing I've seen where people change is it's kind of like addiction. You kind of have to hit rock bottom, right? So if you're kind of an asshole and you talk, you, you interrupt people all the time and you always talk about yourself, maybe you stop having any friends or you have an intervention. Your friends have an intervention with you. Maybe at that point you hit rock bottom and you go, I need to change. I have a problem. But most people generally continue on their track that they're on. And I don't know, I see this all the time with people I work with, and especially people will not change their ideas. So if you, let's say a CEO comes to me and they say, I've got, I think the best way for us to grow is SEO. And I say, oh, well, let's think about that. What about XYZ opportunity? I think we should focus on PPC marketing, or have you thought about changing the product in this way? They will actually double down when I challenge their idea. They will double down and they will keep— they will now defend the idea. And as soon as they defend the idea, they will commit and they will be consistent. What is it called? Commitment and consistency bias, right? Now they will double down on that. So I've just realized, like, trying to change people is impossible. And at the end of the day, we're all like— people are like elephants and you're just the rider, you know, you just kind of go where the elephant's going to go and hope for the best.

You see a beggar, a poor guy on the side of the street begging for change. You say, change comes from within, my brother. Change comes from within. I completely agree with people don't change. I had a thing in my life where at 22 or 24, I forget, It was like, oh, this is rock bottom. And I had like, there was like a distinct moment where I'm like, I'm just going to change that trajectory just a few degrees. And if I just keep going, it's going to make a massive impact. I had, but there's really only like, I remember I think 2 times in my life where I'm like, oh, that's going to change and it's happened. But then like everything else, it rarely changes. It's very hard to break any type of habit or human nature characteristic.

I think I would disagree with that. The only thing I would disagree with is I would just say, I would, instead of the phrase being people don't change, I would say assume people don't change as a reminder to myself. Because the problem is you're like, if you assume that people are going to change because you're being hopeful and you're, you're going to make a bunch of bad decisions because you're going to be baking in change when change is quite rare. And so it's not that they don't change, it's that you should not be assuming that they will change is the trap that you want to avoid.

It's like when you get married, there's that classic saying, like, you know, don't try and change the person that you're with. And I think it's like, be pleasantly surprised. Like, it has happened for sure, but it's, it's really a fool's errand to try and go and change a person.

And also, it's sort of like ads. People are like, oh, ads, ads don't work on me. It's like, okay, everybody thinks ads don't work on them. Everybody thinks they're not average. I think, you know, the same way it's like I think we think that other people don't change. But if I separately had asked you, are you the same guy you were the last 20 years? No, I've learned so much. I've evolved. I've just matured. I've changed so much. But we think other people don't change. I guess I'm a little more optimistic about the change. Although my sister has a funny phrase about this. She goes, people say that people don't change. They do. They get worse. And like, and I think that that's like, you know, more of the how to protect your downside mentality is you assume that people are not going to change or it's just going to, they're going to dig in even further into their current set of patterns. But of course there's so many outliers that I think you can only make it an assumption, not a rule.

Andrew, it was awesome being able to catch up with you. I'm happy things are going well. And you, you said a few things here, like I, I hope the listener does this, but I actually have a notepad here that I take down notes for like everything that we're writing. This profit first thing and how much money leaving the bank. I like, I have a note here. I'm like, shit. All right. I actually have to go and actually do that. Moise said something a few times ago, or instead of Patrick Campbell, we had Patrick Campbell on from ProfitWell on, and I still have his notes here. And I had a meeting with my company right afterwards. I was like, here's what Patrick Campbell said. I just did a pod with him. We got to do this, this, this. And this is another one of those episodes where you've actually given me things that I'm actually— I got to go and run and like tell my company right now this.

Everybody loves that CEO who comes in with a whole new life, life approach every, every 3 days because they listen to a podcast. Like if I was at a company, I'd be like, hey dude, you're not allowed to listen to podcasts anymore or go to these dinners because every time you come back, everything's changing.

That is an annoying person. There's a good way to deliver it though.

It's amazing how just a lack of awareness can change the results of a business, right? Like as soon as I stopped, I remember I used to obsessively look at my credit card statement. As soon as I stopped looking, because I got too busy, I started spending so much on stupid SaaS crap or whatever. And I think just building those processes into your company can make such a big difference. Like it literally is those— Sam, you described that thing of, you know, if you were a plane taking off from New York, you changed 3 degrees and that was the difference between ending up in Seattle versus Tijuana. I think that same thing is true in a company.

Yeah. And I think that this thing might— change the trajectory of, of a bunch of things that I'm doing. Um, thanks for doing this and we appreciate it.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, that was awesome, guys.

All right, that's the pod.